The Exposure -O- Meter; Year-End Award Extravaganza

All year long the all-knowing World Famous Exposure-O-Meter (WFEOM) has toiled in the flooded-out basement of TransWorld Media. The only light down here is from the soothing glow of an overworked computer screen filled with tiny numbers. But now the truth can be told.

We scoured every single page of the Year 2000 issues of Surfer, Surfing, and TransWorld SURF magazines and assigned a point value to each and every photo (both editorial and advertising) we could find, just so you could know who’s really getting the shots, which surfers the magazines love (and which they apparently hate), and which surfers the brands are hyping the hardest.

Kelly Slater Takes Edit Title!

[IMAGE 1]Shane Dorian (22,900 points) was a big mover this year, moving up from last year’s ninth and becoming one of the most promoted surfers on the planet (see below), but he never really had a chance of catching Kelly Slater (32,375 points) for the Exposure-o-Meter Photo Editor Payola award.

Surfing’s six-time world champ seemed to be enjoying his “retirement,” nabbing the equivalent of 65 pages of photos and moving up from last year’s third-place finish.

Last year Bruce Irons ran away from the competition to snag the edit title by a wide margin. This year, Irons was lagging in seventh place in August, but started to rally with a string of Teahupoo crotch-grabbing spreads (pardon the pun). When the dust settled at year’s end, he had squeaked past Mark Occhilupo (18,800 points) by the margin of a single mug shot with a total of 18,900 points. Brother Andy Irons (18,050 points) moved up two places from last year for a solid fifth.

Back in August, Sunny Garcia was loitering in fifteenth place. But as it became clear that he’d be our next world champ, the edit photos began to flow and the stern Hawai’ian rocketed up nine spots to sixth place with a total of 16,400 points. It’s likely he’ll get a big bounce in the next year’s spring issues once he clinches the title.

Occy Cashes In With The Sponsor Big-Smooch Award

Mark Occhilupo might go off on incomprehensible Oz-accented rambles, but he’s the go-to guy for selling surf gear to impressionable young American surfers.

As World Champ, Occy received 21,400 points of advertising coverage last year (mostly from Globe, Billabong, and Oakley) and grabbed The Exposure-O-Meter Sponsor Big-Smooch award. His victory was narrow, however. DC, Volcom, and Arnette helped fuel a Bruce Irons media blitz that gave that young surfer from Hawai’i 20,881 points.

Chris Ward (19,650 points) came in third thanks to DVS, Rusty, Legend, and Freedom (remember them?). Shane Dorian landed in fourth after being plastered in 19,225 points’ worth of ads from Billabong, Freestyle, Future Systems, DC, and Dragon — among others.

The WFEOM Media Whore Grand Prize Winner Is …

A first-place edit ranking and a thirteenth-place advertising ranking gave Kelly Slater a grand total of 43,931 points of coverage last year (or about 88 pages of coverage). That makes him the winner of the WFEOM Media Whore Grand Prize. Shane Dorian made iclose with 42,125 points, followed by Mark Occhilupo (40,200 points), Bruce Irons (39,781 points), and Andy Irons (33,156).

But the WFEOM wasn’t content to merely tally up the numbers. It also tallied who the advertisers pushed and compared it to the list of surfers those craven photo editors like. For example, Conan Hayes had 13,200 points of ad coverage but only 3,175 points of edit exposure, for a Ad/Edit Ratio of 4.16. What gives? Other notables in the Ad/Edit ratio included Matt Rockhold (3.48) and Gavin Beschen (2.99). My guess is we’ll see a lot more of these three surfers in next year’s edit tally.

On the other end of the top 44 Ad/Edit spectrum was Tamayo Perry with 8,850 points of edit coverage and only 1,250 points of advert love. Hmm…

Peter Mel (0.24), Joel Parkinson (0.28), and Dan Malloy (0.35) also got a lot of edit coverage but not many ads in comparison. They shouldn’t feel too bad, however: Kelly Slater only had a rating of 0.36 and his surf career looks just fine.

Who’s Got The Ad Buy?

Volcom, Quiksilver, Hurley, O’Neill, Globe, Etnies, Billabong, Reef, Rip Curl, and Vans (in that order) are the top-ten ad-buy brands, controlling the equivalent of 792 pages of ads last year. On a per-issue basis, Surfer leads the way with an average of 50,108 points, followed by TransWorld SURF with 46,384 points, and Surfing with 45,652 points.

Who Cares About The WCT And How The Brazilians Get No Love.

With a few notable exceptions, just because you rock on the WCT doesn’t mean you’ll get much edit coverage in the mags. In fact, only 16 surfers are both on the Top 44 WCT ratings and the Top 44 Media Whore list. And if your name includes some hard-to-pronounce Portuguese syllables, well, you might get hardly any coverage at all.

Sunny Garcia, Shane Dorian, Mark Occhilupo, and Taylor Knox are all top 44 surfers on the WCT who were in the top ten Exposure-O-meter Edit tally. Most WCT surfers, however, were way down the list. Luke Egan is number two on the WCT, but ranked 59 on the WFEOM. Jake Paterson (third on the WCT) is back in fifty-third place.

It might be availability, it might be jingoism, or it might be the whole language thing, but the top Brazilian contest surfers got hardly any coverage in the three major magazines last year.

The seven mighty surfers from Hawai’i on the ‘CT top 44 averaged a lofty 11,017 WFEOM edit points. The eleven Americans on the WCT 44 nailed down an average of 6,567 points. Even the Seppo-smackin’, trash-talking Australians average 2,875 points of coverage.

But the Brazilians? Only an average of 409 points. In fact, there wasn’t a single Brazilian on the WCT Top 44 who got more than 675 points. Fala!

The Team Awards

[IMAGE 2]The surfers who comprise the top 100 of the WFEOM edit tally controlled 82 percent of the available points in this year’s tally, or 595,897 points out of 881,304. And when we sort that group by clothing sponsor, we get a good idea of which apparel-company team is getting the bulk of the coverage.